Beauty and the Priest

Travis D. Smith discovers April is the surest month for taxes and tarts

Our editor-in-chief ponders Justin Bieber’s detrimental instrumentals

Social conservationist Margaret Somerville considers the distance from Canada to Australia and the earth to the stars

Doug Sikkema sees Eliot and Milton in the spaces of urban parks and the conviviality of community gardens

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York finds the soul, mind and heart of Christ’s Church in the lives of Pope Francis and his predecessors

The infamous attempt to legislate so-called neutrality is really a religious initiative wrapped in an obscuring veil, argue Jason Zuidema and Harold Ristau

From the heart of Christ’s suffering in us comes the grace that releases our fears, Father Tim McCauley finds

Pope Francis has turned heads with his fresh approach to the papacy. Now it’s time he turned his mind to the structures that fed clerical sex abuse, says Sister Nuala Kenny

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat marks the boundaries of a faith that engages the world without sinking into softness or isolation

Father Raymond J. de Souza on the voices of mercy and prophecy in the papacies of Saint John XXXII and Saint John Paul II